swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'.

Jack Cheng On Permanence

My personal take is that for any given task, our minds constantly shift between two modes: review and do. Review-mode give us perspective on the big picture and keeps us on track toward reaching our destination. Do-mode is focused on implementation—building, typing, moving pixels and making changes.

The problem is that when we’re in front of that blinking cursor, everything is so easily editable that we get caught up in do-mode. When we try to review things, we think, “oh, that’s an easy fix, so I’ll do it right now,” and instantly return to do-mode. We keep bouncing back and forth between the two without maintaining the proper altitude to see the bigger picture. To use the forest-from-the-trees analogy, it looks something like this: